Nine Crypto Firms Formed a Quantum Alliance and Split on the Freeze
The new Quantum Alliance says about 6.4 million BTC, 30.2% of supply, sit behind exposed public keys. Its members agree on migration standards and disagree on the hard question: what to do with coins nobody moves.
Bitcoin's quantum problem has moved from conference panels to working groups. On October 15, nine blockchain and security companies launched the Quantum Alliance, a coalition meant to write shared standards for protecting Bitcoin, Ethereum and other networks from future quantum computers.
Its first public number is the one that frames the whole debate: by the alliance's estimate, about 6.4 million BTC, or 30.2% of supply, sit in addresses whose public keys are already exposed on-chain.
Who is in it
Publicly named members include the security auditor Hacken, the Midnight Foundation associated with Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, the quantum-resistant layer-one chain Quantus, and Postquant Labs. Coverage citing CoinDesk also lists American Fortress, Intmax, Keystone, Abelian and The Vault.
The alliance is not launching a new blockchain or a token. It says it will publish open testing and migration guidelines modelled on the way the IETF develops internet standards. That is a sensible scope for a group whose members compete with one another: agree on how to test and migrate, and leave the products to each company.
Why exposed keys matter
Bitcoin's ownership rests on digital signatures. A private key signs; a public key lets everyone check the signature. With today's computers, working backwards from a public key to the private key is infeasible. A sufficiently large quantum computer running Shor's algorithm could, in principle, do exactly that.
Not every coin is equally exposed. Many address types reveal only a hash of the public key until the coins are spent, which adds a layer of protection. But older address formats publish the key outright, and any address that has been spent from and reused has revealed it too. Those are the coins the alliance is counting.
The alliance is careful to say the threat is not live: no current quantum computer has the power to exploit these keys. The question is when one might.
The timeline argument
Members do not agree on that either.
Richard Carback, chief technology officer of Postquant Labs, said he considers machines capable of breaking today's cryptography by 2028 realistic. Bryn Bennett, chief revenue officer of The Vault, said nobody knows the date, but that estimates keep being revised downward, and that the risk can be planned for in advance. Recent research has lowered estimates of the computing power needed to attack Bitcoin's and Ethereum's signatures, though such predictions remain contested.
Two years or ten, the migration problem is the same size. Making Bitcoin quantum-resistant means replacing the signature scheme that authorises every transaction. That needs agreement from developers, miners, wallet makers, exchanges and users, which is a slow process even for uncontroversial changes. Post-quantum signatures are also typically larger, which would consume more block space and could raise fees or cut throughput.
The freeze fight
The sharpest disagreement is about coins that will never migrate on their own: lost wallets, dead owners and, most famously, the roughly 1.1 million BTC attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto.
If those coins stay behind exposed keys, a future quantum attacker could take them. Some in the industry have argued for freezing them first. Changpeng Zhao has suggested freezing Satoshi's coins if they remain untouched once quantum technology advances. Developer Jameson Lopp has proposed limits on vulnerable coins to prevent theft.
Inside the alliance, the split is explicit. Bennett opposes freezing. He argues that no custodian is responsible for abandoned assets, and that freezing is a network governance decision that would set a precedent of trading property rights and neutrality for quantum protection. Carback prefers moving vulnerable coins into a kind of trust, from which holders who prove ownership could reclaim them.
Critics of any freeze point to Bitcoin's founding promise: nobody can confiscate your coins. A network that freezes a third of supply to protect it from theft has, for those coins, done the confiscating itself.
Why standards come first
None of this will be settled by the alliance. Bitcoin changes by rough consensus, not by coalition vote. What a standards body can do is make the eventual decision better informed: agree on which post-quantum signature schemes to test, how to measure their cost in block space, how wallets should handle migration, and how to tell users clearly which of their coins are exposed.
That work is unglamorous and urgent. Ethereum has already set itself a multi-year post-quantum roadmap. Bitcoin, with no foundation and a culture wary of change, has the most to coordinate and the least machinery for doing it.
The takeaway
The Quantum Alliance's real contribution so far is a number and an admission. The number is 6.4 million coins with exposed keys. The admission is that even the people most focused on the problem cannot agree on the deadline or on what to do with coins whose owners never show up.
Neither question gets easier with time. The coalition's bet is that agreeing on the plumbing now will leave the politics less painful later.